Robert Wheeler, Flo Ridlon & Jeff Benjamin Helped Put Jim Thorpe “Over The Top!”, a RunBlogRun Editorial

Updated 23 October 2022

This piece is an important piece. We posted it on Labor Day Weekend and wanted to make sure more people recognize the hard work that was put into recognizing Jim Thorpe.

In this piece, Larry Eder recognizes the hard work that was needed for the reinstatement of the late Jim Thorpe, the legitimate winner of the Olympic 1912 decathlon and heptathlon, including Seb Coe, Robert Wheeler, Billy Mills, Caitlyn Jenner, and Jeff Benjamin.

Opinion – Robert Wheeler, Flo Ridlon & Jeff Benjamin Helped Put Jim Thorpe “Over The Top!”

No doubt by now, many of us Athletics geeks, along with the rest of the world, celebrated the great news last month about the reinstatement of Native American Jim Thorpe into the International Olympic Committee record books.

ABC News Link – 

https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/us-olympian-regains-olympic-winning-title-86912710

What so many of us remember is that Thorpe, who destroyed his competition in BOTH the Decathlon & Pentathlon in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, was then subsequently stripped of his Gold Medals and awards over the hypocritical and racist views of the so-called “Amateurism” rules of the era. 

By 1950,  Thorpe (who also played Baseball, Basketball and was one of the founding leaders of the NFL!) was ranked by many as the GREATEST Athlete who ever lived. 

But the tint of the Olympic debacle never went away in his lifetime and beyond.

Thanks to many petitions and movements from the early part of the 20th century right through the 1980s, Thorpe’s family FINALLY received the Gold Medals (albeit replicas) from the IOC in a sort of apology.

I, like many others, thought that Thorpe’s Olympic injustice had been put to rest.

But I was wrong.

Robert Wheeler and his wife Flo Ridlon, who researched Thorpe and helped restore the medals to the family, were well aware that the IOC NEVER changed the record books. Jim Thorpe was never officially reinstated into the Decathlon & Pentathlon as the SOLE champ.

From the outside looking in, it seems that Wheeler and Ridlon kept the attention on this issue, which only began picking up steam over the last 10 years in the mainstream media.

Alongside the announcement of an upcoming Jim Thorpe movie with  “Bright…